


Glass Jaw

by Birdpeople (DeusExMachina)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Angst, Boxing, Character Meta, Coming Out, Concussions, Gansey is a mother hen, Poetry, Post-The Dream Thieves, Ronan makes poor life choices, character exploration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 20:47:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7376803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeusExMachina/pseuds/Birdpeople
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Remember how it felt to finally have enough of Adam crawling back to us looking like a butcher shop window? Well if it were anyone but you doing this to yourself, this would be my tipping point, I swear to god.”</p><p>“I don’t do it to punish myself. "I’m not a fucking masochist.”</p><p>“No?”</p><p>“In my dreams,” Ronan said slowly, and Gansey finally let himself look at Ronan. “Cabeswater told me the nightmares are, well, mine. I make them. I make them attack me, and in my dreams, they kill me.” Shakily, Ronan raised a hand to cover one eye. “I don’t know what that means, but I do know there are physical things, terrible things, torture, that no living person should know the feel of. But I do. And it scares me. I don’t know how to deal with that kind of pain.”</p><p>And Gansey understood. “Boxing is the evil you know,” He said softly.</p><p>---<br/>Ronan gets in a fight and Gansey comes to pick him up. Takes place sometime after The Dream Thieves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glass Jaw

Gansey’s phone woke him.

He squinted at the screen in the darkness. He didn’t recognize the number, but he picked up anyway, glancing toward Ronan’s door as he did so, worried about waking him.

But Ronan’s door stood open, the darkness behind it still and lifeless. Gansey’s stomach heaved unpleasantly.

“Hello?” He croaked into the phone.

“Gansey?”

“ _Ronan?_ Are you okay? Where are you? What time is it?”

Ronan was slow in answering. “I think it’s around four am. Can you pick me up?”

Worry and fear were twin dragons in Gansey’s belly, snapping and snarling.

“Don’t you have your car?”

The pause was more pronounced this time. Ronan’s voice finally broke the static. “Probably shouldn’t drive right now.”

“Are you _drunk?_ ”

“Always jump to the worst conclusion, don’t you?”

“ _Are_ you?”

“Wish I was. Minor head injury. Do not operate heavy machinery blah blah blah. Pretty please come and get me?”

Gansey was already pulling on his shoes with shaking hands. “Give me the address.”

 

When Gansey pulled into the parking lot behind the tiny, back road bar, he didn’t see Ronan at first. Then Ronan was emerging from the pool of shadow by the BMW’s front fender, climbing unsteadily to his feet, leaning his weight on the hood.

A moment later Gansey was helping Ronan into the passenger seat of the Pig.

He knew better than to ask before they were on the road again.

“What happened?”

Ronan was slumped against the passenger-side door, glass pleasantly cold against his scalp. “Couldn’t sleep. Went looking for a little scrap.”

“Found one, I see.” Gansey glanced at him. “And came out the worse.”

Ronan grinned. It looked more like a grimace to Gansey. “Would you believe that you should see the other guy?”

Gansey didn’t dignify that with a response. “Tomorrow’s Sunday. Are you gonna have a black eye to show Matthew and Declan in church?” He knew that was unworthy of him, invoking Matthew, but Ronan didn’t seem to notice.

He snorted gently. “Believe it or not, Declan’s shown up to Sunday mass with his fair share of shiners and minor to moderate head injuries, a few of which I claim sole credit for.”

Gansey’s grip on the wheel tightened. Under the orange streetlights, his whitened knuckles looked bloody. “Declan boxes.” _This isn’t boxing. This is a cry for help. An insanity plea._ Something _. If Niall Lynch had known this is what his middle child would eventually make of his tutelage, what would he have said?_

Ronan gave a jagged laugh, a sound like glass shattering.

“Sure, Declan still boxes, but he can’t keep up with me. You know what he does? He’s in DC, boxing at those private gyms that you have to be _invited_ in to get the shit kicked out of you. He tapes his knuckles and gets in that ring with senators and judges and people who spend all day deciding how difficult today is gonna be for us normies and he shows them what he’s made of. That he’s got something to back up all that smooth-talking. Knowing him, he doesn’t hold back, either, and that probably _works_ for him. I’ll bet he’s put a couple of noses out of joint and later the same day cut deals in private offices with those same guys.” If Gansey didn’t know Ronan, he could have almost sworn he sounded proud. _You’re awfully talky for someone with a head injury_.

“Not that he doesn’t occasionally get the shit beat out of him,” Ronan conceded. “Not that he doesn’t occasionally _let_ that happen.”

“But he can’t keep up with you,” Gansey says, and somewhere there’s bitterness in his voice, like maybe if Ronan could learn to tuck his chin and take a shit-kicking for the greater good every once in a while, Gansey wouldn’t have to keep him on a leash every time he wanted to take him somewhere.

Ronan grinned, and there was no blood on his teeth, but it was a shark’s grin nonetheless. “Declan’s got no bite to him.”

“Whereas you’re Muhammad Ali.”

“I’ve never had a taste for ear. But, no. He fights senators with fucking day jobs. I fight the fucking Kavinskys of the world, the ones who fight their way up because literally nothing could be worse than what’s beneath them. I fight the people who are fighting to prove to themselves that they may be nothing, but they’re at least better than I am.”

“I see. So Declan’s GQ’s coverboy and you’re, what? Tyler Durden?”

Ronan laughed, a real laugh this time. “Boxing isn’t fight club. There are real rules, for one thing. There’s less of this fuck-society bullshit. Boxing is supposed to be honorable. If you can kick more shit than you take, you can fuck his girl, too. Only fair.”

Gansey raised his eyebrows. “So now you want to fuck your brother’s girlfriends.”

Ronan rolled his eyes. “Hardly. He has terrible taste in girls. And no taste in boys that I know of, and therein ends my interest in commandeering his hookups.”

Gansey stared straight ahead. “Ronan Niall Lynch, you did _not_ just come out to me while you’re concussed.”

“Oh come on, _Dick_ , everyone already knew I was the worst Catholic ever. This should come as no surprise.”

Gansey let silence collect in the car. The tire treads on asphalt, the rattle of the engine. “You’re not,” he said quietly.

Ronan actually sat up and twisted around in surprise. “Not what? _Gay?_ ”

“Not a bad Catholic.” _Not because you’re gay, anyway_.

“Yeah, right. That’s why I’m showing up to church tomorrow with a shiner for my sins.”

 _For my sins_.

“You know you don’t deserve this, right?” Gansey said suddenly.

Ronan made a questioning noise and Gansey gripped the steering wheel still tighter.

“Remember how it felt to finally have enough of Adam crawling back to us looking like a butcher shop window? Well if it were anyone but you doing this to yourself, this would be my tipping point, I swear to god.”

Ronan didn’t speak for a long time.

Gansey pulled in among the cracked blacktop and tall grasses of Monmouth. He turned off the car and waited, still staring resolutely out the windshield, not looking at Ronan. It was so, so quiet.

“I don’t do it to punish myself,” he said finally, and if he sounded harsh, it was a testament to their friendship that Gansey could tell it was to stop his voice from shaking. “I’m not a fucking masochist.”

“No?” Gansey didn’t say anything else.

“In my dreams,” Ronan said slowly, and Gansey finally let himself look at Ronan. The other was playing unenthusiastically with the leather bands around his wrist. “Cabeswater told me the nightmares are, well, mine. I make them. I make them attack me, and in my dreams, they kill me.” Shakily, Ronan raised a hand to cover one eye. “I don’t know what that means, but I do know there are physical things, terrible things, torture, that no living person should know the feel of. But I do. And it scares me. I don’t know how to deal with that kind of pain.”

And Gansey understood. “Boxing is the evil you know,” He said softly.

Ronan nodded. “Not in so many words but… yeah. Yes.”

“There have to be better outlets. Why don’t you join crew with me?”

Ronan snorted. “I don’t know if you’ve met me, but I’m not exactly one for organized anything.” He thought about it. “I wouldn’t even count Catholicism out of that.”

“But you can’t just keep using rocks to shipwreck yourself. Don’t you want to be happy?”

“It’s all I want.” And Ronan may not lie, but to Gansey, that sounded like the truest thing he had ever admitted.

“Is there anyone you love?”

“Sure. Our whole disgustingly codependent bunch. Even Sargent, although you’ll never get me to admit it unconcussed.”

Silence was a language Gansey had always spoken more fluently than Ronan, but Ronan had always been a quick study in languages.

“Listen,” Ronan muttered. “That’s a whole can of worms I’m not ready to open right now.”

“That’s fair.” He _had_ just come out to Gansey. He unclipped his own seatbelt. “Need help managing the stairs?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

Gansey helped Ronan out of the Pig, and soon they were climbing the stairs together. From the way Ronan shut his eyes and clutched at the railing, it occurred to Gansey that the other might be slightly more concussed than he previously had let on.

“Remind me again why I’m not taking you to the hospital?”

“Because you know I’ve had worse and I’ll be fine?”

Gansey let it go.

Once on the second floor, Gansey directed Ronan to take off his shoes and take a seat on his bed. “I can’t let you sleep,” Gansey said, “So I guess that means I can’t sleep, either.”

“You can if you want. I promise to be good.”

Gansey just shook he head and crouched down on Second Street in his model Henrietta, picking up the glue. With his free hand he flicked through the music on his phone, finally selecting something not too intrusive and turning the volume down. He held out the phone to Ronan. “Plug that in, will you? Or it’ll die when we’re at school tomorrow.”

Ronan took the phone and got up. When he came back, he flopped face-down onto Gansey’s bed once more. He held out a mint leaf for the other before propping himself up on his elbows, watching him work, chewing on his own leaf. It was dark. Gansey worked by the light of the lamp on his desk, but the room had already begun to fade by imperceptible degrees to silver, a living daguerreotype.

Ronan spoke first. After all, silence was not his native tongue. “D’you ever put off going to sleep because you’re afraid of your own dreams?”

“No. That’s not the nature of my insomnia.”

“What’s it like for you?”

“More like sometimes my mind is too crowded with words and ideas that it takes a very long time to quiet it down enough to sleep.”

Ronan subsided. “I’m not joining crew,” he muttered, “But I might start going running with you in the mornings again.”

“You’re welcome to, although my legs won’t thank you for it. You always run me harder than even coach does.”

Ronan smirked. “That’s because all the Aglionby crew boys are soft, tennis-and-golf, afternoon tea on the green before croquet, monied little princes.”

“Gosh, tell me how you really feel. They’re not that bad, you know.”

Ronan didn’t even bother replying to that. The unspoken _And yet I’m here and they’re not_ hung in the air. Finally, Ronan rolled onto his back, hands folded on his stomach, looking up at the ceiling. Gansey glanced at him every once in a while, making sure he was still awake.

“Do you know any poems?” Gansey asked finally.

“Squash one, squash two…”

“Oh, fuck you,” Gansey said, without heat. Ronan smirked and sat up, cross-legged, facing Gansey.

“ _If I were young, as once I was_ ,” He recited, and it was the soft lilting voice that Ronan reserved only for this, only for verse, “ _And dreams and death more distant then, I would not split my soul in two, and leave half in the world of men, so half of me would stay at home, and strive for Faerie in vain, While all the while my soul would stroll up crooked path, down narrow lane_. Something, something, something else. I forget the rest.”

“What was _that?”_

“The Fairy Reel,” Ronan said. “For the record, I don’t know the rest even when unconcussed.”

“Did you write it?”

“Not that one, no.”

“So you _do_ write poetry.”

“Sometimes. I don’t always write them down.”

“Will you recite one for me?”

Ronan snorted. “Fuck no. Not now, at least. Some of them are in Latin, which makes them harder to remember at the moment, and of the others, I’d rather be fully cognizant before humiliating myself.”

“If you can say the word ‘cognizant,’ I think you’re good.”

“Even so.”

Gansey focused on the awning he was attaching. “In that case, what about another unoriginal?”

“I can do that.” Ronan reclined, propping himself up on his elbows.

 

“ _I know that I shall meet my fate_

_Somewhere among the clouds above;_

_Those that I fight I do not hate,_

_Those that I guard I do not love;_

_My country is Kiltartan Cross,_

_My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,_

_No likely end could bring them loss_

_Or leave them happier than before._

_Nor law nor duty bade me fight,_

_Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,_

_A lonely impulse of delight_

_Led to this tumult in the clouds;_

_I balanced all, brought all to mind,_

_The years to come seemed waste of breath,_

_A waste of breath the years behind_

_In balance with this life, this death.”_

The poem drew to a close, and still Gansey fiddled with his work, eyes down, giving Ronan some privacy. Finally, the other pulled in a ragged breath.

“Gansey?”

“Yeah?”

“… Thank you.” _For everything._

Gansey held out his fist and Ronan reached forward to tap his knuckles against it. _I’ve got you_.

                     

**Author's Note:**

> Want to know the secret of making your characters' dialog sound concussed? Write it at 1:00am. Fun fact: The first part of this I wrote was the long paragraph about Declan boxing.
> 
> 'The Fairy Reel' is a poem by Neil Gaiman. The second poem is by WB Yeats and is called 'An Irish Airman foresees his Death.' It's about suicide. That one I actually do have memorized. 
> 
> Anyway, I hope this did it for you. Don't forget to leave a comment, or talk to me on tumblr @quasi-birdpeople.


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